The protests were against rising grocery prices, and the foot soldiers in what was described as a “housewife revolt” were largely middle-class women with children.

Fed up with the increasing cost of living, they marched outside of supermarkets with placards demanding lower prices, sometimes printed in lipstick.

The picketing started in Denver and swept to other cities, prompting Time magazine to report that supermarket boycotts were spreading “like butter on a sizzling griddle.” President Lyndon Johnson’s special assistant on consumer affairs egged them on, urging protesters to “vote with the dollar.”.

Marches and boycotts over food costs would crop up time and again over the next decade, aimed at the prices of coffee, meat and other products.

population was born after 1981, the last year of double-digit consumer price increases.

Consumer prices are now rising again: The Labor Department’s consumer price index rose 5% in May from a year earlier, the biggest increase in more than a decade.

Today’s pickup in consumer prices may not lead to a similar long-term inflation problem.

His job was to redesign inflation measures that didn’t properly capture how housing costs were changing.

With a surfeit of money flowing into banks, businesses and households, and fewer goods to purchase due to production shortages, prices went up.

2% inflation target.

Prices rose.

Prices rose.

2% inflation.

Prices rose.

2% inflation.

entered World War I, the Labor Department’s consumer-price index rose 20% from a year earlier.

Similarly, the index rose 13% in 1942, after the U.S.

Consumer prices started rising as President Johnson sought to fund the Vietnam War and his Great Society social programs.

When Richard Nixon entered the White House in 1969, the annual inflation rate had already risen to 5%, from less than 2% during the Kennedy administration

When meat prices soared in 1973, some likened the ensuing consumer boycott to the Boston Tea Party

Meat prices increased by 37% in 1973, 22% in 1975, 24% in 1978 and 27% in 1979

First, the cost of borrowing—the interest rate—goes down, because banks have a lot of money and are prepared to lend it out cheap

Imagine an economy where people do nothing but produce and consume oranges; each person, on average, makes one dollar a day and purchases one orange a day

President Johnson and then President Nixon badgered the Fed to keep pumping money into the economy and pushing interest rates lower

President Johnson and then President Nixon badgered the Fed to keep pumping money into the economy and pushing interest rates lower, thinking it would drive unemployment down and help their economic programs and electoral prospects

The Fed often complied, but the main effect was to drive prices higher

In 1971, for example, the annual inflation rate was still over 4%

He also wrote that he wanted the president to know “there was never the slightest conflict between my doing what was right for the economy and my doing what served the political interests of RN.”

Before the rate cuts that year, Nixon’s lieutenants threatened Burns by planting stories in newspapers that the president was considering stacking the central bank with White House supporters and also falsely accusing Mr

This meant other central banks could come to the Federal Reserve and exchange their growing dollar reserves—built up through their gains in trade—for gold at a fixed price

Nixon severed the link that August, sending the dollar’s exchange rate tumbling

As a result, the price of imported goods doubled over the next four years

It was intended to punish countries that supported Israel but also had the economic aim of pushing up the price of oil as its value in dollars fell

economy into a game of leapfrog

To keep up with rising costs, in turn, businesses raised prices even more

Some economists had thought that when unemployment rose, inflation would fall

Complicating matters, worker productivity slowed inexplicably, making it harder for the Fed to read where the economy would go next

A flood of women into the labor force also made it harder to decipher a stable rate of unemployment

“It is illusory to expect central banks to put an end to the inflation that now afflicts the industrial economies,” he said

“They have come to accept price increases with less antagonism.” For millions of people, prices rose faster than wages, leaving them worse off even though their pay was going up

Central bank independence and an official low inflation target became lodestars for central bankers around the world, including the Fed

If consumers, workers and businesses come to believe that inflation will worsen, they will bid up prices and wages in anticipation, fueling the very inflation they loathe

Inflation episodes after World War I and World War II showed shocks sometimes hit an economy, spurring a temporary spurt in prices, but then businesses and households get back to a normal way of operating

The economy is much different now from what it was in the 1970s

Inflation has run below the Fed’s 2% target consistently since 2008-09, prompting Fed officials to conclude that what the economy really needed was stimulus

Inflation has run below the Fed’s 2% target consistently since 2008-09, prompting Fed officials to conclude that what the economy really needed was stimulus

Fed officials say recent consumer price increases are transitory, tied to the Covid-19 crisis

Measures of inflation expectations are steady

Will we see Americans in the streets again protesting out-of-control prices